What Curtain has done is very dangerous to language educators. She has watered down what cannot be watered down – Krashen. She has pulled what she knows of Krashen into the realm of the textbook, and so has Mimi Met, who has had ties to the Realidades company, which is really scary. Is Karen Rowan in on the take too?
I don’t believe Curtain and Met are doing this on purpose. I think that they really believe that they are right. But they are not, unless you agree that it is o.k. to mispresent Krashen and TPRS by calling them just more “tools in the toolbox” (Met’s direct words to me) when they are far more than mere tools in a box.
Whether Curtain is aware of what she is doing (she is not), the result is the same – she is offering teachers a plan that is very appealing to them, one that allows them to keep the textbook and yet claim that they are using comprehensible input and thus are aligning with ACTFL and the Three Modes of Communication, which they are not when they use the textbook.